


and you smiled, because you knew.

by morallygreywaren



Series: what it means to be married [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: (obvs), 5+1 Things, Anal Sex, Andy and Booker and Quynh are mentioned very briefly, As is I guess historically consistent homophobia but like, Bottom Joe, Gay Marriage, Jane Austen - Freeform, Leonardo Da Vinci - Freeform, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Michelangelo - Freeform, Shakespeare, Unbeta'd, also includes mentions of, and even Emperor Nero!, because in this house we die like men, no one gets admonished or beaten they're just being more careful, well you know what I mean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:15:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25263706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morallygreywaren/pseuds/morallygreywaren
Summary: Joe is an incurable romantic. Nicky doesn't really believe in an institution that promises only what he already has.Or: Five times Joe proposed to Nicky and one time he didn't.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: what it means to be married [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2041723
Comments: 101
Kudos: 1851





	and you smiled, because you knew.

**Author's Note:**

> Are we still doing 5 + 1? Is that still a thing?
> 
> In other news, I have watched The Old Guard twice in as many days, lost my mind and a lot of sleep and decided that there was too little fic out there, so wrote this in one sitting to distract myself from editing and all the other stuff going on in my life and the world at the moment.
> 
> EDIT: The whole inspiration for this thing has been somewhat jossed by Luca Marinelli just... going out there and saying ['my husband'](https://throgmortem.tumblr.com/post/625246878751178752/harrynightingales-please-write-im-very-lucky) like _THAT_ , but this is still half fic, half me working through what the concept of marriage _means_ to people who've been around for its invention and can't just throw 'til death do us part' around willy-nilly. 
> 
> Title is from the English for: "Come ti vidi m'innamorai. E tu sorridi perché lo sai," (When I saw you, I fell in love. And you smiled, because you knew.) which is by Arrigo Boito from the Romeo and Juliet opera, NOT Shakey P (for once).

Nicolò can barely remember the first time it happened. Only that things had been relatively _new_ then still, which is a word that he doesn't use very often anymore these days.

It feels like they'd only just stopped killing each other whenever they had an argument, like Yusuf's language still felt small and slippery in his mouth when he tried to speak it, like the vowels and their meaning evade him even in his best attempts at communication.

The shared warmth that wasn't blood, that had been new. The kisses stolen under night skies on voyages west and east, ships that belong to men they don't know bobbing underneath their arched backs. But it is not the thrill of those nights that makes him sure he will always remember them, much preferring the shaky certainty they reached thereafter.

It was the novelty of it all, learning a man, learning Yusuf, by sight, by hand, by mouth until senses were too little to encompass all that he was to him. Nicolò felt new himself in those days, even as he'd been well over a hundred years old, many times what he should have expected to live. They were still alone then. Sometimes, it felt like they were the only people in the world.

He thinks it was on one of those nights, on a ship that was bound east to what he might once have called the Holy Land, that it happened for the first time. They were sitting on the deck, huddled in rough blankets against the cold and the prying eyes of sailors. It had been one of those nights when sleep wouldn't come easily, and Nicolò was lying on his back, tracing their journey by looking at the stars.

He could feel Yusuf shifting beside him, had learned to anticipate when he was going to break a silence, even though he hadn't been able to predict what with yet.

“It is about time,” Yusuf said. He was silent after, but the sentence was incomplete, so Nicolò waited. “Many times, these days, I have been thinking, that ordinarily I should like to ask for your hand.”

Nicolò lifted his arm, heavy with the day's weariness, and let his palm fall gently where he knew Yusuf's face to be. “Here.”

Yusuf scrabbled at his knuckles, tiny pats of his fingers on the back of his hand. “What's this?”

“My hand,” Nicolò said when Yusuf managed to take it off his face. He closed his fingers around Yusuf's, so their entwined hands came to rest on his chest instead. “You can have it.”

It didn't feel like the end of a conversation, but Yusuf didn't say anything after that. His breaths eased and he left him for sleep, but holding his hand, Nicolò knew that he had been wrong. Above them, the stars were strange in their beauty, old and undying – or constantly dying, but he didn't know that yet, not about them and not about the stars – and as long as they were under the sky, they were not alone.

–

The next time Nicolò can remember Yusuf talking about it again is years later, hundreds of them. They'd met Andy in the meantime, a woman already jagged and torn at the edges in a way that frightened them, but who was unmistakably like them. They had seen her in their dreams long before she found them. They knew not to speak of Quynh, the other woman in their heads, when they saw her eyes resting heavy on their fingers entwined on the table over dinner. Would they, too, become like her? It's a loss too difficult to imagine, and so Nicolò doesn't when he isn't forced to.

Andy had told them to lie low for a while, that she'd be back to find them when she'd need them next, and they had told her to come find them in Florence. This wasn't the best place to lie low during the height of the Renaissance, but Nicolò found that he didn't mind too much. It was early days, but maybe he'd known even then that the period would become one of his favourite times in history. Who better to understand what 'renaissance' truly means than someone who'd been reborn and had to find themselves anew, time and time again.

And so they ate food they prepared themselves in their flat, and they bought clothes in ridiculous colours for each other, and they visited art exhibition after scientific exhibition after court after court, and they couldn't hold hands in public, not really, but the sun smiled on them most days and they were happy.

“I do not see it,” he had told Yusuf after a tour of an atelier of one of the fleeting friends they'd made. This friend had just finished a painting that was due to be delivered the next day, and they had been in attendance at a celebratory dinner. “Already there are people proclaiming she is the most beautiful woman, or captured in a way most beautiful known to man, but I don't see what is going to be so special about her.”

“You know they say beauty lies in the eye of the beholder,” Yusuf said. They were on their way home on the dusk-heavy streets of Florence, both their tongues thick with wine. “Her husband commissioned the painting so it could hang in their second home, to celebrate the birth of their son. I'm sure he will find pleasure gazing upon her face over the stairwell day in day out. It's going to be his love that renders it.”

“Maybe he shouldn't have asked Leo to do it then.” The streets were almost empty at this hour and Nicolò sidled closer to Yusuf than he would usually dare. He could blame the drink if he had to. “And he could have had it thirty years earlier.”

They shared a private laugh at their friend's inability to finish anything on time, which turned wistful only when they realised the passage of that time. Thirty years, it was nothing to them. But this painting would have taken half of Leonardo's life.

Yusuf rested his hand on the small of Nicolò's back as if to steady him when they reached the entrance of the street they lived on. “I of course would give you something much better if I was allowed to marry you.”

Nicolò rolled his eyes and tugged Yusuf's fingers from where they were creeping around his waist, interlacing them with his. “You know that is not possible. Nevermind highly unnecessary.”

“I know the church wouldn't do it. So what? We're not the first to have this wish, and many men have married men before. Emperor Nero is said to have done it three times.”

Nicolò shook his head. “Need I remind you that he also killed all of his spouses and half of Rome?”

“So have I you.” Yusuf pressed a short kiss to his knuckles on the hand he was holding, apology and deference at once.

“He was still crazy.” Nicolò smiled. “I mean, what did he expect of it? The young men he married could much less bear him children than I can you.”

“Hasn't stopped us from trying.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do,” Yusuf said. They had reached the entrance to the house they lived in, creaking up the stairwell to their flat. “And I don't.”

Nicolò sighed. “I don't see why you would want to marry me. I don't have a dowry that my father would give me, and if I did, it would be long spent on the life we've already led together. And you hardly need someone to sanctify our offspring.”

Yusuf looked at him, long and with more meaning than he could decipher then, much less remember, before they stepped into their flat.

“You haven't mentioned the most important thing that I said though.”

Nicolò looked up from untying his shoes.

“I said I would give you something much better if I was allowed to marry you.”

Nicolò rolled his eyes, but he stood back up to his full height and loped his arms around Yusuf's neck. “And what would you give me?”

And to this day still, he remembers the way Yusuf's eyes blazed, more mirth than fever, before he leaned in to whisper in his ear. Which was just as well. He'd always preferred Michelangelo's statues to Da Vinci's.

–

The Renaissance couldn't last forever, and they learned their own couldn't either. There was a war to see it off, of course there was, every power in Europe determined to saw off their piece of Italy. It had been a long time since Nicolò had seen any country as a homeland of any sort, but when Andy had told them they could stop fighting, that all they'd have to do was avoid the plague for a while, he'd been relieved.

The plague didn't touch them, of course, even as it continued to ravage the continent, but it was the first time that they had keenly felt humanity's desire to stretch the years that had been given to them. That maybe if only they knew how it worked, that thing, or that deity, or whatever it was that knitted their cells back together from injuries and maladies no other body could recover from, a lot of the suffering could end.

By rights, it should. But Yusuf and Nicolò were over five hundred years old by then, and the more time they spent with Andy, the clearer it was that it never would. But there was one thing humans got continually better at, even if it wasn't healing.

In the late sixteenth century, they lived in London of all places, and between the stench and the sickness and the certainty of death at every corner, humans had gotten so much better at alleviating the time between the suffering. There were poets everywhere, it seemed, and more people who could read what they'd written. For everyone else, there was theatre.

Yusuf and Nicolò were busy most nights breaking up pub brawls and preventing murder in the seedier parts of London, but when there was a premiere of a new play, they took the night off. Most fights started on the way out from the Globe anyway.

But not the third time it happened. They'd been to the premiere of what Nicolò had assumed was going to be a love story, a comedy, but he had been proven wrong rather quickly for a Shakespeare play. It was a mere two hours later from the first time the lovers had kissed on stage, and already, the faces of the groundlings around them were swimming with tears, as the two found their untimely end by their owns hands. Not much of a scene setter for bawdy fights.

Yusuf would not stop sighing as they made their way over the bridge once it had ended. Nicolò placed a hand on his shoulder. It was an allowed presence, a steady comfort when more touch was not possible.

“We'll go for a funny one next time,” he promised. “Where they only get each other at the end and stay that way.”

Yusuf reached across his chest to pat Nicolò's hand on his shoulder. “Just think what could have happened if they'd been like us.”

“So that their violent delights wouldn't have found violent ends?”

“ _Still waking sleep, that is not what this is! This love feel I, that feel no love in this_.”

“Maybe you can try to imagine that they awoke again. In a life after this one, or like we did. They don't need to be apart.”

“And they knew it.” Yusuf nodded, and Nicolò wanted to reach out to catch the tear that slipped from his eye with his finger tip. Nothing pained him like Yusuf's agony. He squeezed his shoulder.

“What is it that you're not telling me?”

He could see Yusuf swallow, his Adam's apple bobbing once, twice under his beard. “We could have done what they planned to. We'd have been happy.”

“What do you mean?”

Yusuf stopped and leaned against the railing of the bridge, but facing Nicolò instead of the river. “Run away. Paid a priest to marry us so that no one would be able to tear us apart much longer. And I'd have known you in half-death, half-sleep, and even if I hadn't, if I had raised a sword against myself, or poison, it wouldn't have mattered. We'd have been across that hill by dawn, married in a town over. For us, we would have been happy.”

“Joseph,” Nicolò said, because that's what he called him then. He said it like the back of his fingers that he wanted to run over Yusuf's cheek. “Why ever do you think we are not?”

He frowned. “Not what?”

“Not happy.” Nicolò spread his arms like a player on Shakespeare's stage, but he didn't raise his voice. “Show me one couple we've seen in the last five hundred years who were married and who were happy.”

Yusuf was quiet. There were no stars in the sky behind him, London too dark and too bright at the same time to see them.

“I don't think you can. There is something miserable about them, even the ones who choose to say 'yes' and 'I do' when they're bid to, and I don't see why you think we need this for us.” He stepped closer to him. “I am happy to pretend. When we get home. I am happy to pretend I take you as my husband, and then you can pretend we consummate a marriage as virginal as we were before we set out for the crusades. But let us not dwell on people's every day misery just because Bill Shakespeare wrote about some horny teenagers.”

Yusuf smiled at him then, even as his eyes turned upwards, away from Nicolò. “Play pretend? You'd really do that?”

“I would do anything that stopped you from thinking we weren't happy.”

He was very close to Yusuf when he took his face in his hands. “We are happy,” he whispered, and Nicolò knew he'd never believed otherwise. “Of course we are.”

“Even though the course of true love never has run smooth?”

Yusuf let go of his face and pushed away from the railing. “Now you sound like a play he hasn't written yet.”

–

Nicolò doesn't think often about God. When he does, it never ends at being a thought, and always begins to be a feeling that he has yet to find a name for, in all the centuries he has roamed the Earth. God was who he was taught to lay down his life for. But that had turned out to be a tougher feat than imagined. And that was before he had watched endless numbers of people ride into battle, and die happily for a higher power that, if it existed, didn't seem to have any inkling to protect them. Or care for their sacrifice.

Andy is the only person he can imagine ever being worshipped as a deity, but his thoughts about that often turn only more complicated still. He doesn't know when the time will come, but it will come, that will render the years between him and her insignificant. And then where does that leave him on the spectrum between man and God?

So he doesn't like thinking about it, but he'd also never stop Yusuf when he drags him into churches or other houses of God. His feelings about the whole thing are similar, he knows, if not more complicated when taking into account what side of the war about God he started out on. But over the years his appreciation of the aesthetic over the substance had grown, and particularly when they were back in Rome they would often spend hours in basilicas, blending into the thrum of worshippers.

The fourth time it happened was in the middle of the eighteenth century. Nicolò should have seen it coming this time, at last.

“We must have visited every chapel in Rome by now,” he said into the room around them. Yusuf was pressed against his back, his arm loosely slung over Nicolò's waist.

“Doesn't help that they keep building new ones.” Yusuf breathed into the space between Nicolò's neck and his shoulder, the little expulsion from his speech sending a slow tickle down his spine.

They were staying in Rome for a few days because at this point they owned a building there. Turned out it was easier to come back to places you had forgotten to call your home when you chose to erect a place there that was, even if only in part.

The Nicolò who he'd once been wouldn't have recognised this Rome, this house, as his home. But all the Nicolòs he'd been since recognised a space with Yusuf in, and so it had to be true. His home was everywhere now. He closed his eyes. Sleep was close.

“Have we ever been to St Valentine's chapel though?” Yusuf's words washed over him.

“Hm?”

“St Valentine of Terni. I think his relics are held somewhere in Santa Prassede, maybe he even has his own chapel.”

“Maybe.”

Yusuf smoothed his fingers over Nicolò's arm once, making warmth blossom through him as he went. Nicolò could tell that there was somewhere he was going with this, but he was too tired to follow.

“What was he a saint for?”

“This and that,” Yusuf said into his neck, his hair. “There's a myth that's followed him since the thirteenth century though.”

Nicolò carded his fingers through Yusuf's hand on his abdomen to still him.

“Apparently he performed secret weddings for those who couldn't get married publicly under the eyes of the authority. Wouldn't stop even when they threatened his life, and he died a martyr because of course they killed him for it.”

They were quiet for a moment, only the ebb and flow of their breaths a steady lull in Nicolò's ear.

“Couples celebrate it today still. Some of them exchange gifts and thank him, for giving others like them God's blessing when no one else would. Maybe we should, too.”

He'd been half asleep, but the last sentence pulled Nicolò back from the brink, his eyes blinking awake all of a sudden. He didn't think about God much, and they didn't speak about God much, and it was never a good sign when they did.

“How do you mean?” He turned around in Yusuf's arms until he could face him, his hand on his hips, their eyes inches apart.

Yusuf leaned forward to kiss him. “It was a remarkable thing to do, and he did it selflessly. For the couples who are like us, and for others that aren't but felt equally hopeless in the face of everything.”

“There are no couples like us,” Nicolò said, but it wasn't what he meant. He kissed Yusuf.

“So we don't deserve to be blessed?”

“You deserve everything and more.” Nicolò's hand had been resting between them, and he slid it up Yusuf's neck to cradle his head, a grab of his hair to hold onto. “But I don't think there is a God who would bless us.”

Yusuf was quiet and they kissed for a long time after, languid and unhurried, like they were stretching out under a peach tree on a summer's afternoon.

“Is this why you keep asking, hinting to marry me?” Nicolò whispered when they lay there after. He didn't need to search Yusuf's eyes anymore to see what he needed to, not after seven centuries, but it was dark and there was an uncertainty in all these unspoken questions he'd levelled him with. “Do you still feel we need a blessing, after all this time, and everything?”

Yusuf shook his head, but he plucked Nicolò's hand from his head again to kiss his knuckles. “It's you I need.”

“And you have me.” When Yusuf wouldn't reply Nicolò motioned for him to turn around so he could wrap his arm around his waist, the other fitting in the crook between Yusuf's head and shoulder to close around him. “And I have you.”

When he breathed in, there was only the scent of Yusuf's hair and the hint of dusk from their house, and there was no God who would bless them. But that didn't mean they were not deserving of each, or of good things to come their way.

“Let's go to Santa Prassede tomorrow,” he whispered. In the absence of all else, they would have this.

–

The last time Yusuf asked, Nicolò had come to expect it. The circumstances of this one are less hazy in his mind than the rest, although in hindsight he cannot remember so clearly his answer and his reasons for giving it.

They were back in England for a while after the dreams of a new addition to their merry band of immortal stragglers had led them to Booker. Andy was scouting a new mission, war still ripe on the shores of Europe, and so they'd stayed back with him teaching him to cook and the languages they spoke, and how to shoot from different guns without killing himself.

But otherwise, these were lazy days and Nicolò had begun to build out the library of the Wiltshire home they had, if only so that he could coax Yusuf to read to him when they're not training Booker.

“You've taken a liking to Ms Jane Austen, then?” Yusuf asked when he presented him with her latest book, already lying down to rest his head on Yusuf's thigh. He smiled up at him, and then he closed his eyes. “ _Pride and Prejudice_. Oh well, let's see then.”

Nicolò knew the conversation this book would lead to from the first sentence, the pause Yusuf made after reading. He could picture the crease in his eyebrow, the little self-satisfied smile that crept over his face as he carded his free hand through Nicolò's hair.

“ _It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife._ ”

But this was precisely what he liked about Jane Austen. The way she put things so aptly, her wit always so much more warm than it was scathing. People with daughters, it seemed, were obsessed with marriage, the daughters themselves half-crazed by the notion, the security of a future still in peril until rings were exchanged in a church.

But Yusuf didn't pause like he'd appreciated her satirical prowess. Yusuf paused like he was already thinking about how he could bring this sentence up again later, slip it into conversation tactfully but still catch Nicolò unguarded, to needle him about this issue they had spoken about and not spoken about for centuries.

And for once, he managed.

While Booker stayed with them, Yusuf didn't allow Nicolò to bottom for him. “You're too loud, _habibi_ ,” he'd whisper into his ear whenever their kisses grew heated, already smiling when Nicolò reached for the oil.

Booker was at the other end of the hallway, and likely asleep. There was a single candle on their nightstand that illuminated Yusuf's form atop him, his hard edges rendered sepia-soft in this light. He rode Nicolò with the kind of slow care that inspired madness in him, but he knew too well the keening sounds he'd make if their roles were reversed.

It was not that he didn't enjoy being inside Yusuf. He loved every moment with him, every intimacy an exploration of their sense of where one of them ended and the other began, borders they had to seemingly draw anew every other day. But it was maddening, the way they moved together and he constantly felt like it was too much and not enough, like tending to an itch by scratching every part of skin around it.

And it was worse when Yusuf went as slow as he did that night. There was a wave inside him he wanted to crest, but all Yusuf seemed to do was build the pressure higher, inviting Nicolò back and back into him, but he couldn't find the cliff they could go over together.

He closed his eyes.

“Stay with me, _habibi_.” Yusuf leaned over him and Nicolò looked into his eyes instead, steadying himself to thrust into him in time with his rise. It was not enough.

“Can you go faster?” he asked.

But Yusuf only looked at him, continuing with his agonisingly slow crests that wouldn't be enough if Nicolò met every single one of them.

“Please,” he heard himself say. “Please, please, please.”

It was not that he had to come every time. It was not that he didn't enjoy the times without urgency, when it was just the two of them, a candle, the rest of the world falling away but them. But there were times when it was he, when it was him who needed to fall away.

“I'll do anything,” he whispered, panted.

“Anything?” Yusuf said. His hips stuttered, at once the pace Nicolò needed before they slowed down again. He was slow to frustrate, but this did it, Yusuf's hand on his mouth to stop his growl before it could escape the walls of their room.

“You know what I mean,” he said. “Just please, please. What do you want?”

“You know what I want.” Yusuf sat up to his full height again and dragged Nicolò's hands up over his thighs to his hips. He sped up, the press of his ass around Nicolò's cock alternating with delicious friction. Nicolò thought he was going to cry. “I'm a man in possession of a good fortune, so it is a truth universally-”

“But you're not single,” Nicolò panted. He couldn't believe Yusuf had chosen this precise moment to bring it back up again, and he wanted to laugh at how ridiculous it all was, but he also wanted to cry because he really, really, needed to come at this point. “And I won't be your wife.”

Lucky for him, there were ways to shut Yusuf up that were best used during sex. He lunged up to pull Yusuf back on top of him, a solid blanket of warmth, and kissed him in time with his thrusts, until the wave he'd been building crashed down around them both.

It was like deep sea diving, coming back with slow strokes until he could gasp for air. They lay there entwined for a long while until they grew cold, and Nicolo could feel the hairs stand up on the back of Yusuf's arms and the small of his back.

The roused to clean themselves up then slipped under the cover still naked, drawing close for comfort.

“I don't want you think that I'm rejecting you,” Nicolò said into Yusuf's chest where he was nestled. “It's not that I don't want you, or that there's anything I'd ever deny you. I guess I just fail to see the point of marriage for us.”

Yusuf drew him closer and pressed a kiss onto his forehead.

“Why promise anything in public that we have already sworn each other a million times over? Why announce a union of love when we know there's forces far stronger binding us together? Why do we need an institution when all we ever had were each other?”

He could feel Yusuf nod, the beard scratchy against his forehead. But it was a heavy nod, not quite agreement, not quite anything else.

“I love you,” he said.

“And I love you.”

–

But the world keeps on turning. Nicolò likes to think he'd be one of the first to know if it ever stops, but in the meantime, he can always tell.

Another day, another disaster somewhere, a war, a corrupt government agency, an unspeakable evil he isn't able to put into words yet.

But it's also another day, another kiss from Yusuf, a shared smile over food or over guns, a reassuring pat on the head from Andy, a bet with Booker.

The world keeps on turning, and it feels like it might get worse, but he also feels like there's too much good for them to ignore completely. On the days when it happens, he likes to be there for it, as much they're always there for all the terrors the world has to offer.

Even if sometimes it's just sitting in front of the TV with the love of his life, a beer in one hand, his head in the other. They do this sometimes. Carefully watch old versions of the news to make sure none of them are in the background, or worse, the story.

On this December evening in 2000, it's the day's news their watching though. He plays with Yusuf's curls and sags against the back of the couch as the jingle to the news hums through the room. There is something oddly hopeful about certain days in the long, long history of his life that he still can't quite explain. There are times when he can turn on the TV and not feel the sinking dread that Andy and often also Yusuf accustom with it.

He is sad sometimes, that they feel everything this way, burden themselves with the anguish. But more often than not, he thinks, hopes, that it's a choice. That he can do better because he can already see a world that others only hope to imagine.

“Good evening,” the presenter on the news says, “in a historic move the Dutch Senate has today passed a bill legalising same-sex marriage in the Netherlands, becoming the first country in the world to do so.”

Nicolò smiles as the programme on the TV cuts to the streets of Amsterdam, where men and women in very little but very colourful clothing are celebrating despite the cold.

“ _Het betekent heel veel voor mij,_ ” a young woman says, crying. _Liefde is liefde_ , a poster behind her says, and throughout her interview they can hear the crowds chanting it over and over, _Love is Love. Love is Love._

There are goosebumps on his arms suddenly, his shoulders, his neck, his spine. For someone who lived through as much history as he has, it can still be strange to become aware when witnessing it all of a sudden.

Yusuf sits up from where he'd been lying on the couch, replacing his head with his hand on Nicolò's thigh. He's still staring at the screen when the news programme has already moved on to another segment, when Nicolò is already only watching him.

He looks at Yusuf, and the lines on his face that haven't changed in a day since he'd known him, takes in his mouth, agape in a pleasant shock that he hasn't known in years. And he wishes, with the sudden ferocity of a gun wound, that it hadn't taken him nearly a millennium to understand.

There are institutions, and there are Gods and blessings, there were economic factors and the legitimacy of heirs that needed to be assured, but Yusuf, his Yusuf, had always known that marriage wasn't really about that. Not for them, and now not for anyone.

When Yusuf turns to kiss him, he is already there, waiting. He laughs into his mouth, giddy with the news, drunk on a strange happiness he thought he'd figured out long ago as he pulls Yusuf closer, well into his lap.

“ _Prego_ ,” he says, laughs, pants. “Do we still have the Dutch passports?”

**Author's Note:**

> Massive thanks to [@Em109](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Em109) for proofing the Dutch, het betekent heel veel for mij ;)
> 
> Let's all get married on tumblr! Hit me up, I'm @morallygreywaren xx


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